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People who find this book interesting might like to try a few more...
Very funny and perceptive. Adams documents inside out workplace stupidity with staggering accuracy. All of the pomposity, dishonesty, bullying and ritualism is there. The end section of this book discusses affirmations as they really work.
This is where the mystical types start to get worth reading. Blavatsky (and the loathsome Crowley) are below this line, Steiner, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff are above it. Bailey describes a telepathy that works by convergence to objective reality, and deep structure perception.
It's worth savouring this book by a master of the subject. Bell's philosophical rigour and willingness to recognise the unsolved problems are quite wonderful. He writes in a way that is accessible to the non-specialist reader, and the maths is there for those with a technical background - although his use of bra-ket notation is not quite like anyone else's!
A detailed and scholarly account of much of Gurdjieff's life, the ancient traditions which were his likely sources, and Bennett's impressions of the picture of reality which he attempted to convey in the first half of the 20th Century.
This very sensible and practical book founded the "transactional" school of psychotherapy. Berne begins by describing a social context where everyone engages in "games" for purposes of "time structuring". He then shows that for some people the games become pathological, so they spend their time repeating self-destructive activities. Berne doesn't suggest any reason why people play games, except for filling in the void between now and the time of their deaths in an organised way. The picture of boredom addicted societies where all activities end up being ritualised fits right in here.
Generally recognised as the most sensible guide to running practical, effective software projects. If modern organisations had taken Brookes to heart, commercial software production would not be stagnant.
Intelligent discussion of a self organising universe filled with deep structure.
Excellent general discussion of issues in quantum mechanics and chaos in particular. Rich yet very readable.
Common sense observations regarding making effective software projects, most of which apply to any kind of teamwork. The emphasis on jelled teams is particularly interesting.
He doesn't actually explain consciousness at all, but Dennett provides a superb introduction to the fascinating field of Consciousness Studies.
Deutsch's view relates the themes of quantum physics, epistemology, theory of computation and evolution in a way that is quite friendly to the picture in Chapters 1 to 5. He's deeply wedded to multiple universes, but in such a way that we can swap them out and install the backwards arrow of time instead. In particular, his challenge on p217, "To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor's algorithm works." is answered in Chapter 4 as an event that must be possible on both arrows at once - the same place probability amplitudes come from.
Non-technical anecdotes describing how the genius saw the world.
Vintage Feynman. There's a very rare bit in here, where he seems to handwave and fudge, unhappy about what entropy is at cosmological scales!
See how Feynman first shows us a universe of dynamic movement, then gets into special cases like simple harmonic motion. Newton does this the same way, yet physics is always taught with dynamic motion last, after the wrong impression - that there can be a static frame of reference - has been established.
Feynman on quantum mechanics. These are the mysteries, he says, don't worry about them, just make progress...
All good, but particularly the sections on Charles Bennett and the energy value of information.
Laing started as a psychiatrist, and became a philosopher when he attempted to understand why his patients had been surrounded by the webs of mystification and coercion their relatives had created. Boredom addiction and inside out thinking provide a reason, and Friedenberg's critique of Laing remorselessly describes the damage boredom addiction and inside out thinking have done.
This is a technical book, but it's the book on design patterns in software engineering. Emphasises the compositional aspects of software design - the bit boredom addicts can't do.
A simple window into the priorities and perceptions of a mind less frenetic than most modern people.
Fairy stories about how our heros manage to think around workplace boredom addiction and solve problems, instead of being driven off site with their stuff in binliners, which is what would really happen. Even so, provides valuable insights into the nature of the problem (including its utter predictability) as it appears on the ground.
More fairy stories.
A science fiction novel in which the poet demonstrates the relationship between poetry and real magic.
An insightful biography of a boredom addiction free person, and what he achieved.
Very hard to read due to a construction that forces the reader to stay awake. Once you have them in mind, clearly contains the picture in Chapters 1 to 5. Also, once you get into him, Gurdjieff is very, very funny.
The more accessible style and Indiana Jones ripping yarn narrative in this collection of exemplary people sometimes conceals the deep points Gurdjieff makes by providing examples. Do you believe the bit about the stilts?
A wide ranging description of the stresses that conscious children are subjected to in the context of production line "education", the potential of conscious children, and practical measures to make life more bearable for conscious children in the present situation of undeclared classroom warfare.
By drawing on all the mystical traditions, Harvey displays their essential unity, and describes the flowering of conscious experience that is possible in this self-organising universe with two arrows of time. He shows that this is possible without the need for "gurus", which is a very good thing because there aren't enough advanced real magicians around to teach all the people who must now awaken - even if novices could tell the difference between frauds and the real thing. This wonderful product of the intuitive traditions also demonstrates the union, or synthesis, of all understanding that must be at the centre of the next stage of human evolution, by describing exactly the same situation that this deductively grounded book describes:
Jesus' "Kingdom" and Aurobindo's "Supramental Creation" are not in any way otherworldly utopian dreams; they represent the final possibilities of the evolution of the human species, the ultimate flowering of human potential that could be affected by a marriage at the highest level and in every arena between complete mystical awareness and empowerment by love with all sciences, all arts, all aspects of political and economic reality. Through such a marriage of transendental wisdom, divine compassion, and direct practical technological intelligence, a wholly new world is waiting to be engendered - a world in which the rhythms of nature will be secure from human greed and exploitation, in which all beings will be united in a vision of social, spiritual, and political equality and justice, and in the possibility of the highest mystical development, a world in which all beings will be offered the highest choices for their lives in an environment made safe and luminous by holy sciences of spirit and matter, a spiritualized technology, a mystically illuminated academy, a music and painting and literature inspired by divine awareness.
A sincere engineer looks at his art and begins to break free of the sterile, robotic worldview. The Journey of the title is of course, Hermetic.
Laing's description of humanity in the grip of totalitarian boredom addiction and inside out thinking.
Laing recognised the deep logical structure in the linguistic games he saw people playing, and set it down. At the root of it all is the logical blindspot documented in Chapter 3.
A variety of papers, some more accessible for the non-technical reader than others, but all fascinating.
This is about creative programmers, not criminals! Levy describes the ethical philosophy and spirit of fun that allows creative programmers to form jelled teams without management - and produced modern information technology. Everyone "diagnosed" with ADHD fits right in with these people.
A holistic basis for starting to understand our planetary ecosystem as an integrated thing thing in its own right.
If you've never seen this book, it's a real treat. For some reason, the geometry of nature is very fractal.
An idea packed introduction to the huge output of the Waldorf Schools' founder.
Wise words from the dawn of time. It couldn't be anything but a human activity, but this is all too easily forgotten in boredom addicted society, where people avoid direct connection with their work.
Just Another Alchemy Hacker!
Lots of description of boredom addiction, how to break it, states of consciousness etc. There's a "system of hydrogens" that might be about multi-fractals.
Peter Ouspensky's erotic science fiction novel! Contains a "block universe" model of time.
Standard text, so accessible for physics types.
The thing is, Voldemort's got a point! Why should magical people have to hide their abilities from the purple-faced Muggles?
The common mystical picture of reality in very beautiful and accessible form. Like the Mandelbrot book, this one is an art object as well as a text.
The famous neurologist describes the experience of the Deaf, including the richer abilities of Sign for indicating viewpoint, process and relationships.
A really smart guy ponders the deep questions. Everyone should read this if only to dispel the myth that "there are no answers". There's always other ways of looking at things.
Describes the sterile and antagonistic situation that develops in commercial settings. Schwartz explains the motivational and delusional structure by using Freudian psychology instead of proposing boredom addiction as the cause, but there's no doubt about what he sees people doing.
Boredom addiction free business thinking. Introduces "Sengian Patterns", which are the deep structural patterns that boredom addicts can't see in business situations.
A detailed biography of Graves which demonstrates how even those who are close to real magicians and appreciate their results can completely misunderstand and dismiss the magical worldview if they do not share it.
The history of real magic in one fascinating volume.
Ancient teasers and teaching stories. Very light hearted and accessible.
Describes the now famous "hypothesis of formative causation", which suggests that living things tend to grow towards the physical forms of similar things. This makes all oak trees seem to "vote" on what shape an oak tree should be. With two arrows of time, Sheldrake's observations become equivalent to Teilhard de Chardin's "omega points".
A very scary book, written from the perspective of a deductively fixated mind that sees itself and all other minds as programmable robots without the capacity to form an independent "I". Skinner is exactly in accord with half of the psychology described by Gurdjieff, but completely omits the beneficial effects of feedback in a self organising universe.
A cult classic amongst creative programmers nearly 30 years ago, also referenced in Robert Anton Wilson's Universe Next Door books. Spencer-Brown introduces the "primary algebra", which can be used to solve logic problems. Where things get really interesting is that in Spencer-Brown's algebra, inside out thinking can be indicated by placing an extra "cross" around every term in a logical proposition to signify that it has been dragged over the system boundary into the internal thinking space of the deductive mind acting alone. Then the logic all works out in a self consistent way, yielding a result which doesn't match reality! In particular AND and OR relationships are switched.
Evolving structure will coadunate and reach an Omega Point.
Predeterminism in General Relativity, how Penrose escaped inside out thinking and applied global methods to black hole entropy, and how Einstein turned up at his local physics group with another theory of Relativity every Wednesday for a month before they stopped iterating!
A clever, urbane, humanist science fiction novel that in the end is silly because the central conceit contradicts itself.
This ancient text still hasn't been bettered. Which is odd considering the importance of this labour intensive conscious work - and the amount of money sloshing around it.
White doesn't seem to understand that alchemy is a transformation of the alchemist, but his journalism is excellent so you can draw your own conclusions from his data.
The offshore problem Yourdon predicts didn't happen, because programming isn't the kind of context-free proceduralism people think can be done well in open plan offices. Sets out the dreary predictability of the standard management stupidity rituals in boredom addicted shops.
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Copyright Alan G. Carter 2003.
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